Saturday, November 30, 2013

In a review of a William Kentridge piece now up at the Met, Holland Cotter says:

"The piece ... has
recently been acquired jointly by the Metropolitan and the San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art. ... [S]urely the nature of the purchase establishes
a salutary practical model, in a time when cash is tight and art prices
sky-high, for institutional resource-sharing in the future."

As I've said before, if it's a salutary thing for Museum A and Museum B to buy work jointly, then it's got to be a salutary thing for Museum A, in a time when cash is tight, to sell a 50% interest in a work (or works) to Museum B. The result is exactly the same. It's a kind of modified Ellis Rule.

NYT: "Sicily’s regional government has set a travel ban on 23 of the island’s
most important artworks, a decree that says such works, many of which
were recently lent to museums in the United States and elsewhere, should
not circulate abroad except under extraordinary circumstances."

Tuesday, November 26, 2013

UPDATE: More from Nicholas O'Donnell: "The upshot ... is that
the court cannot compel the sale of DIA’s collection. This cannot be
repeated enough, since coverage continues to miss that point. The only
real question is if the city resolves to sell the collection, can the
museum stop it? The view here is that it cannot, but expect much more
ink to be spilled in court on that issue."

The New York Post editorial board is not impressed with Judge Block's decision in the 5Pointz case: "It says much about the dismal state of property rights in this city that the judge who authorized the Wolkoffs’ plans to demolish their building practically invited those who had painted on it to file in civil court for damages for the loss of their artistic works. He did so by suggesting that the US Visual Artists Rights Acts may well protect the 'ephemeral nature' of graffiti on a building. Translation: The owners may have to pay damages for painting their own building!"

Nicholas O'Donnell on the oral argument at the Court of Appeals in the Jenack case: "The view here is that the buyer (Rabizadeh) got the better of the argument, but one has to wonder how the equities will weigh on the court in a case where the winning bidder simply repudiated a voluntary transaction."

Thursday, November 21, 2013

The Art Newspaper has the list of Knoedler buyers, what they paid, and what the gallery paid Rosales. Greg Allen tweets: "Knoedler paid Rosales $1m for that 1949 Newman, then shopped it to a museum for $18m. #theyknew."

Wednesday, November 20, 2013

The Judge issued his decision -- a really interesting one -- in the 5Pointz VARA case today. I'll post a link when I find one. [UPDATE: Here we go.]

He begins by noting that "[t]his marks the first occasion that a court has had to determine whether the work of [a graffiti] artist -- given its ephemeral nature -- is worthy of any protection under the law" (p. 2).

He ends up answering yes ... in theory ... VARA "makes no distinction between temporary and permanent works of visual art" (p. 25), it "protects even temporary works from destruction" (p. 26). He left open the question whether the works qualified as works of "recognized stature" for purposes of VARA protection (a question "best left for a fuller exploration of the merits after the case has been properly prepared for trial, rather than at the preliminary injunction stage," p. 24).

But he still denied the injunction, because the artists couldn't show irreparable harm: "plaintiffs would be hard-pressed to contend that no amount of money would compensate them for their paintings":

"[P]aintings generally are meant to be sold. Their value is invariably reflected in the money they command in the marketplace. Here, the works were painted for free, but surely the plaintiffs would gladly have accepted money from the defendants to acquire their works" (p. 25).

He adds that "the ineluctable factor which precludes ... injunctive relief" was "the transient nature of the plaintiffs' works." They "always knew that the buildings were coming down." "Particularly disturbing is that many of the paintings were created as recently as this past September, just weeks after the City Planning Commission gave final approval to the defendants' building plans. In a very real sense, plaintiffs' have created their own hardships" (p. 26).

So the transient nature of the works precludes injunctive relief ... but it doesn't preclude "potentially significant monetary damages if it is ultimately determined after trial that the plaintiffs' works were of 'recognized stature'" (p. 27). And here's where it gets really interesting.

He closes by noting that the City Planning Commission required 3,300 square feet of the exterior of the new buildings to be made available for art. But the defendants, he says, "can do more":

"They can make much more space available, and give written permission to Cohen to continue to be the curator so that he may establish a large, permanent home for quality work by him and his acclaimed aerosol artists. For sure, the Court would look kindly on such largesse when it might be required to consider the issue of monetary damages; and 5Pointz, as reincarnated, would live" (p. 27).

Is it me, or do you get the feeling he's trying to tell them something?

UPDATE: Foley Hoag on the moral of the story: "[T]his case is a cautionary tale for artists and property owners alike. ... Given a slightly different fact pattern, the artists might have successfully blocked demolition. If an artist and a property owner contemplate a piece of artwork that will be intrinsically connected to a building, it is in everyone’s best interest to actively address that fact before the art is created. The parties could agree to a VARA waiver, find a way for the art to be detachable, or make the art a 'work for hire,' in which case the artist would receive compensation, but VARA protections would not attach. If the parties can’t agree on one of those options, it might be best for the artist to find a different canvas, and for the owner to find a different artist. Otherwise, artists risk having to combat unexpected attempts to demolish their work, and property owners risk having their rights in their property limited for the duration of the artist’s life."

The Toledo Art Museum has sold more than 200 works and "another 50 works are scheduled to be auctioned in January." "It costs money and takes up space to store works that are never going to be displayed, so why not find a different home for them on the open market?"

Trial's about to start in Los Angeles. "Fawcett decreed in her will that all her artwork go to the school, yet O’Neal insists that Warhol gave him a copy of the portrait as a gift and it belongs to him."

Sunday, November 17, 2013

What is the right price for the Bacon that sold for $142 million this week?

$127.41 million?

$93.8 million and forty three cents?

This isn't Snapchat or Twitter. There's no P/E ratio to look at, or revenues, or any of the other metrics by which you can make claims about the "true" value of the asset in question. There are no "fundamentals" when it comes to art. As Peter Schjeldahl says, "any price—many millions, a buck fifty—paid for any work of art is absurd." What makes this one any more or less absurd than any other?

Saturday, November 09, 2013

Suppose that's the worst case scenario -- the museum has to come up with $200 million and then they'll be left alone. Is that the end of the world, all things considered? Does the Detroit Institute, minus $200 million worth of work, cease to exist? The museum has been -- conservatively -- estimated to hold $2.5 billion worth of art. (And it could be a lot more.) But even on that conservative estimate, it would come out of this, in a worst case scenario, with 92% of its collection intact. (And that assumes that 8% would just be sold off completely; what if, instead, they entered into a Fisk-like joint ownership arrangement for some part of the collection?) Of course nobody wants to lose that 8% (except, I suppose, the people in the city whose museum acquires it, assuming it's a museum that acquires it), but it's important to keep straight what's at stake here. Assuming Local 4's sources are correct, it seems a little over-dramatic to me to talk about "closing the museum."

"Since over the artists have repeatedly repainted the warehouse walls, 5Pointz might have a hard time establishing that the graffiti there is of 'recognized stature'. The constant repainting might lead the court to conclude that the graffiti artists did not have any expectation for their paintings to be permanent, which would remove the case from the scope of VARA. Moreover, Thomas F. Cotter, a professor specializing in intellectual property at the University of Minnesota Law school, noted that extending VARA protections to 5Pointz would seem to leave the Wolkoffs with no practical legal means of tearing down their own building, which “wouldn’t make a great deal of sense."